


The Holy and The Broken

by JoAsakura



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Eldritch, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-16
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2019-10-11 00:45:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 6,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17436638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: In a strange future, the Earth is protected by a dark and hungry god.And a broken soldier becomes it's next sacrificial bride.





	1. Chapter 1

Gods consume their offerings in the liminal spaces. In the smoke between fire and air, in the bogs where water and earth compress into one. Where the edges of the thermosphere bleed past the exobase and into the void.

_ That  _ is where the Reaper lives.

It allows one station in its domain, a temple of sorts.

The crew there, they catch glimpses of it sometimes, roiling black clouds riding the solar winds that churn the upper boundaries of the atmosphere.  They catch glimpses of the moon, where mankind hasn’t set foot in over a century. 

Nothing will ever attack the Earth again, but no one ever leaves it without the Reaper’s blessing.

And each year, as they have for one hundred and twenty six years, they make an offering.

  
  



	2. Chapter 2

_ Reaper’s Eve, 20XX, 8pm _

Jack stretched and turned off the camera with a yawn. The chat was virtually empty- even perverts didn’t like to miss the biggest day of the year after all- and there was no sense in wasting his bandwidth allotment to run a cam for no one but a few free trial losers.

His shoulders hurt where the low-rent replacement augments fit into sockets designed for a completely different pair. The military had repossessed them when they’d finally retired him from service at twenty seven. He’d lost his arms at eighteen in the August Riots, and he’d been back in the field for the September ones.

The VA civvie arms were crude- rubbery and bright orange, spat out on an antiquated 3D printer, and the viewers loved watching him in his faded old field uniforms, open and disheveled as he pleasured himself. Sucking the foul-tasting rubber of his fingers while he pumped his cock with the other, scarred chest flushed and sweating.

They liked watching the soldier boy undone. 

It wasn’t like he had a lot of other options. There were too many soldiers from too many border actions and pointless wars, busted up and broken down, fighting everyone else for too few jobs.

He shimmied out of his pants and padded, naked, to the little kitchen to fetch a beer and shove a ready-meal in the cooker. Outside, the city streets were decked in red lanterns, dull glowing through the falling snow.

In midtown, the streets were filled with celebrants as this year’s Bride prepared her ascendance. Awkward and not always personable, Satya Vaswani had not been as popular as some of her predecessors. Jack had always been a fan of Olivia Colomar – the tiny Mexican hacker had had a devilish smile and her social feeds had been full of not only the typical duties of her station- blessings and benedictions, kissing babies and visiting old folks homes, but parties and adventures Jack could only fantasize about.

He had all her merch, and all of Genji Shimada’s, the green-haired yakuza party boy who’d charmed the masses a few years before.

Comparatively speaking, Satya was kind of… normal. A poor university student from Utopea, her architech studies cast aside as she’d been scooped up by black-clad Talons. Jack plopped down on the futon and turned on the TV, just as she was exiting the shuttle, the cameras following her down the decorated corridors of the Station.

They hadn’t announced the Bride of the new year yet, and Jack took a swig of beer. The conceit was that the Reaper’s blessing passed at the moment of ascendance of the old Bride to the new, but Jack was enough of an atheist to consider that a load of hooey.

But he enjoyed the spectacle. 

On the screen, they stripped her of the Bride’s finery and dressed her in a pressure suit. She suddenly seemed very small and very fragile. She didn’t wink at the screen like Olivia had, or blow a kiss to his fans like Genji.

He just watched her, grim-faced behind the hardlight faceplate, and his stomach felt a little queasy. He didn’t hear the soft ding of the quick-cooker as the acolytes recited their vows and led her to the airlock.

But he saw the flash of red lights outside his window and as Jack stood to peer out of them, Satya Vaswani balking as they pushed her towards the airlock, the cameras cut to the satcams, lightning flickering in the black clouds blanketing the station.

He didn’t hear the announcer’s excited voices because a hoard of black clad Talons and a flurry of drone cams busted his door in.

On the TV, the black clouds receeded and Jack glanced over to see himself on the screen, naked and clutching his beer.

“The Bride has gone home, welcome the Bride,” the masked man at their head said.

“Well, fuck,” Jack said, his words echoing on the TV, and he chugged the rest of his drink.

  
  



	3. Chapter 3

Jack barely had time to process the fact that he was naked on live feed and clutching a beer before the commandos parted like a dark sea and a woman shaped like a haughty, furious eel strode into the room. Her scarlet hair stuck up like a cardinal's crest, and her fingers were long and sharp as claws.

She stopped, inches away from Jack, looking him square in the eye, and turned the beer can in his hand without once breaking eye contact. “Labels out, always, your holiness. The sponsors are quite particular about that,” she said with a thick accent that reminded him of his old Gram. “But you are immensely photogenic. A handsome veteran, awarded the Sword of Heaven and the Silver Heart, am I right? So, grievously wounded, forced to turn to sex work to make ends meet in a world unappreciative of his service. People will _love_ that.”

 

Jack very slowly brought the beer up and took a long, noisy slurp, returning her glare. “I’m going to get some pants, Noodle Lady.”

“The name is O’Deorain, and we will get you clothing befitting your station, your _holiness_ ,” she made the word sound like an insult, eye twitching as she and Jack continued to stare at each other. The military had replaced his eyes early on in his service, and the artificial lenses never dried out. Her jaw clenched and she continued. “And, _honestly_ , no offense, but you spend most of your time naked, jacking off for strangers on the internet. I wouldn’t think your lack of trousers would be your biggest concern at this point.”

“Yeah, well, unless all of you are gonna be paying me fifty bucks an hour starting five minutes ago, I’m going to put on some pants, possibly even a shirt,” he lifted his chin. “I take a variety of payment sources.” He glanced past the tall, angry noodle of a woman staring at him, at the increasingly concerned group of men and women with her. There was one in particular, leaning insouciantly against his ruined doorframe, that caught his eye.

He was older, iron grey curls close cut out over warm brown skin. His dark eyes scanned the room with amusement until he reached Jack with his gaze. His thin smile turned into surprise, heavy black brows lifting as he locked eyes with Jack. Surprise that turned into even broader amusement.

Then the woman was back in his face. “If you’re putting on a shirt, make certain it has sleeves. Cover up those hideous arms until we can have ones that are more appropriate constructed,” she bit the words out.  By the time Jack had extricated himself from her, the commando at the door was gone.

“Fuck,” he muttered.

“Also the cursing,” she sighed.  “We practically had to follow Shimada around with an airhorn to blot out his.”

Jack stalked over to the laundry basket that served as his closet and pulled a pair of sweatpants adorned with a grinning pachimari over his long, scarred legs. He sniffed a t-shirt emblazoned with the Arizona Deadlocks mascot on it, then turned back to her. “Why me? And are you guys always such a disaster? If I’m the Bride, how come I don’t feel filled with, I dunno, the Reaper’s blessing or something?”

O’Deorain tapped one frighteningly long nail against her chin then sighed. “Because, Jack Morrison, the actual Bride chosen from the world lottery? Took a bullet between the eyes a few hours ago. Thankfully, we had a list of… alternatives.”

 “And I was the most attractive?” Jack pulled the shirt on, wincing as the sleeves caught on his ill-fit arm sockets.

 “You were within a ten-mile radius,” O’Deorain said blandly. “Now come along, your holiness. You have a speech to make.”


	4. Chapter 4

 Jack was ten minutes into the entire affair, ensconced in an elegant car that cost more than every place he’d ever lived combined, wedged in between Moira O’Deorain and a very polite and not unattractive slab of meat and hair who’d introduced himself as Jess McCree, when it hit him.

Both O’Deorain and McCree were impeccably dressed in plain, dark suits and Jack- wearing a _mostly_ -clean Arizona Deadlocks jersey, pachimari sweatpants, a faded blue hoodie and a a pair of well-worn combat boots without socks in the middle of winter, suddenly took stock of the enormity of what was going on. 

The _actual_ , _real_ Bride was dead according to O’Deorain. Jack couldn't even wrap his head around it. The ritual had such a homely, commonplace feel to it that Jack had never stopped to think about it too much. No one did. You lit your lanterns, watched the festive shuttle launch, sang along with the prayers.

But at the end, that glimpse of Satya Vaswani’s face had not been one of a woman who wanted to be pushed out of a high orbit space station into the questionable embrace of an unthinkable being that had lived in Earth’s atmosphere before Jack’s grandparents had been born.

He wanted to ask her how many of the Brides had been like him- backups, going through the motions of some celestial blessing they’d never experienced. Had any of them? Had Olivia Colomero and Genji Shimada been making the best of a situation like his?

He wanted to ask her if she’d ever seen the Reaper. ( _He_ had, once, a HALO jump over EurCen right into a terrorist cell’s floating airship. Just a glimpse, a ripple of clouds that were so ineffably dark his brain momentarily lost to ability to gauge how big they were. They took it as a good omen, and he’d killed his way through the crowd of blue-armoured men and women with a sense of inner peace.)

He wanted to ask her a thousand things, but instead, Jack Morrison turned to Moira O’Deorain and very seriously said “I left my burrito in the quick-cook,” before vomiting beer and bile on her lap, his face ash-white.  He sank down in the leather seat. “Holy fuck what the fuck _what the fuck_.” 

“Well that took longer than I expected,” McCree murmured as O’Deorain let out a hiss that sounded like a rapidly deflating tire while she rooted around in her bag for a handkerchief. Her jaw twitched violently and he held up a hand. “Hey now, it’s ok. Sometimes, the holy spirit, it kinda comes on like food poisoning.”

“What the fuck?” Jack repeated in a slightly different tone of voice. He felt like his entire vocabulary had suddenly been reduced to those three words, albeit with varying levels of intensity.

O’Deorain made a strangled noise. “It’s expected you will have questions,” she said with the sort of cheerful tone a person makes when they’re considering strangling someone as she did her best to clean up. “Normally, you would have a bit more prep time but you’ll be brought up to speed right after you make the traditional New Day speech.” 

Jack opened his mouth to say “what the fuck” again, but then pressed his lips together. He’d sat in front of the screens with his parents every year growing up, listening intently to the Bride’s speech, analysts on sidebar channels making predictions for what that would mean for the coming year.

Whenever he’d brought a boy home, Mom invariably trotted out the pictures of him draped in an old curtain, her costume jewelry on his arms, playing Bride with his entourage of Crusader dolls and stuffed animals, practicing his speech.

“Ok, I can make a speech,” he said, staring blankly at the back of the driver’s seat. “I know what I’m going to say.”

O’Deorain slapped a thin piece of paper against his chest. “Yes, yes you do,” she said with a scowl.


	5. Chapter 5

The next several hours passed in such a grotesque blur of pageantry that later, sitting in a bathrobe and drinking something thick and blandly healthy, Jack barely recognised himself on the TV.

They had arrived at some sort of studio where he'd immediately been whisked away from O’Deorain and McCree and within a distressingly short time, been primped, prodded, and shoved in a suit us with just enough vaguely military-esque detail to promote his “damaged war veteran" image. Enough detail that he felt his back starting to sweat and he suddenly found himself searching faces in the crowd for Moira or Jess. He barely knew them, but they were as close to familiar as he had.

He thought, for the briefest of seconds, he saw the man who’d been among the commandos, his handsome, dark face peering at him from the bustling crew, but even as Jack tried to say something, a blink and he was gone again.

Jack had endured the worst the world’s conflicts could generate, but he’d never felt so uniquely alone as he did while a woman he did not know patted concealer under his eyes, talking about him to the man doing his hair as if he wasn’t even there.

The suit itched and the makeup felt strange, but it was the veil that was the worst of it. They carefully arranged the yards of delicate fabric about his face and he thought he might scream. Gossamer black and smoky as their god itself, the knowledge that the head it had been slated for had been shot thru made it fell more like woven lead than silk.

He didn’t even remember giving the speech, generically hopeful and free of detail as it scrolled across the tiny screen before him on the podium, but he remembered how much he disliked the feel of someone else’s words in his mouth. There had been the flash of a thousand cameras, and hundreds of voices raised in cheer and the world tilted and spun as hands he didn’t know led him to and fro.

Afterwards, O’Deorain scooped him up again and he’d arrived…. Here. On the surface, it looked for all the world like a fancy hotel, but Jack had counted security systems in place, and the number of men and women in neat, dark suits like Jess McCree, the subtle bulge of weapons under their jackets. “You might wanna try and get some rest. We’ll get you sorted out in the morning, I reckon,” McCree had said kindly, and the lanky woman beside him looked at Jack with an oddly constipated expression that he took as something approaching pity.

“You… you guys wanna come in and help me raid the minibar?” Jack weakly joked as he surveyed the elegant, anonymous room. He flinched then as O’Deorain’s expression returned to its normal state.

“There is no minibar, your Holiness,” she said, archly looking back down to where Jack had puked on her earlier. “There is a shower though, and it’s lucky the adoring masses couldn’t smell you. It’s like a brewery had a baby with a sweaty jockstrap.”

“Now, Moira, no sense in berating the poor guy, we did sorta show up unannounced and all,” McCree held up his hands with a little grin. “Seriously, though, sir. You need to rest and there’s a ton of stuff you’re gonna have to learn real quick tomorrow.”

O’Deorain pressed her lips together, hard, trying to hold back some comment, but then she simply nodded. “Shower, rest, and we’ll have Echo bring you something to replace your lost burrito.”

Echo stood near the window now, the omnic’s faintly glowing blue face reflected against the city skyline. “You should sleep now, sir,” her perfectly modulated voice just loud enough as to not be jarring. “It will be dawn soon.”

He looked away from himself on the screen and took a sludgy slurp. “Echo, what happens to all my stuff?”

“I will catalog anything you may need. The rest will be preserved for the great archives, as the possessions of your predecessors, unless you have family you wish to designate belongings to,” she said simply, turning without a sound to look at him. “I am seeing your parents died in the war and you have no close living relatives, however, Your Holiness.”

The drop in Jack’s stomach had nothing to do with the heavy drink. “Just call me Jack, please.”

“I can’t do that, your Holiness,” Echo said with a touch of amusement. “I do have one message for you, sir.” Her tone was different then, absent and mechanical. “Beginning playback, one message from her Holiness the Bride, Olivia Colomar, marked critical, open immediately.”

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Olivia's message.

“My name is Olivia Colomar, and if you’re seeing this…” the pretty, petite woman in the flickering image sat back and took a drink of something, ice clinking softly in the glass. “Well, I’m dead, or risen to the heavens or whatever. But you already probably know that since you’re a Bride too.” 

Jack’s eyes darted up to Echo, who stood frozen in mid motion, then back to the projected image in front of him. “How….”

“Before you ask a recording how this is happening, Echo _let_ me hack her- I didn’t violate her systems or anything, she’s my friend, I’m not that much of an asshole! But we agreed she should forget about it. This is hidden so deep in her code, it’s practically not even here. I’m that... I… I _was_ that good. You might wanna get a drink if that’s your sorta thing, by the way.” Olivia rattled her glass at the camera with a smug grin. “I’ll wait a few.”

“That’s a _great_ idea,” Jack mumbled, and set down his bland smoothie and made a beeline for what he prayed was a bar. A few moments of opening cabinets and pawing through the contents produced a bottle of whiskey and he didn’t bother with a glass.

“Ready? Ok, look. First off, I hope whoever they got to play me in the inevitable biopic of my life is smokin’ hot, we all deserve to be remembered as smokin’ hot, even that one stubby guy about fifty years ago with the beard. So you know my story, I hope, right? Little hacker girl, doing identity theft and credit fraud for Los Muertos. Man, we were cool, right? Stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, doing God’s work. They called me Sombra- _the shadow_ \- because I’d be in and out of an account without a trace,” she took another long drink, looking straight at Jack from the past. “Did you know there are Los Muertos in almost every country? When I found out about that, I was proud of that too. International criminal organization for the win!” Olivia laughed and snapped her fingers. “Wicked.”

Outside the window, the city was quiet. He could hear the sounds of traffic coming from Olivia’s video as she paused to look at something long lost.

“When I got chosen, it was like being vindicated. Plus, my mom always struggled, didn’t like my dirty money. But now, now she was never gonna lose her bakery. Hell, Dorado’s been booming since the announcement. It’s good for everybody,” she absently rubbed the rim of the glass against her lip.

Jack had been in Dorado a few times during his service. It had been a quaint, fading, tourist-trap with every third store selling trinkets and replica relics of their very own Bride. She had a technical school named after her. _Booming_ had not exactly been an adjective he would’ve applied to the little city.

He was midway through another swig of whiskey, when he gagged, laughing. (Trinkets and replicas, for fuck’s sake,) but Olivia’s image didn’t notice, of course. ( _Yes, that’s right folks! A two hour best-of compilation of his holiness Jack Morrison wanking off to your favourite hymns_! God take us all, that is gonna fucking kill O’Deorain. _)_

“So, it’s October as I’m making this video. And I have had _seven_ kidnap attempts made on me since January. That’s pretty fucking crazy, right?” Olivia shook her head, and Jack wracked his brain trying to remember seeing anything like that on the news. “I know what you’re thinking,” she continued. “It’s all been suppressed. O’Deorain? She’s good at what she does. Real good. The last time, it was in September.  And they got me, they got me in this van with a goddamn bag on my head telling me to just stay still and then I heard the gunshots. One, _thud_ , two, _thud_ , over and over.”

In the video, her face- always laughing and smiling in her social media posts, every official portrait – was hard, her eyes grim. “And one of my kidnappers, she… it was a woman, and she fucking sounded like pepe le pew or some shit… she says ‘we’re trying to save you, remember that’ and I dunno if she got away, it happened crazy fast. And then there’s McCree, ripping the bag off my head and he just keeps saying how I’m safe. Looked like he was gonna cry, for God’s sake.”

There was a warmth in Jack’s stomach that had nothing to do with the whiskey. Getting rescued by McCree didn’t sound like a bad tradeoff for a body count, after all. But that wasn’t the point.

“I didn’t tell him what she said. Haven’t told any of them. But I started looking. They monitor your ‘net access by the way. No big for me, I doubt you’re gonna be me. _So_. Companies that sponsor the Bride, did you know their value skyrockets? How they compete behind the scenes with the church to get their shit associated with the fucking Bride of Heaven? Big money. Astronomical money.” Olivia gestured and a string of files appeared on the edge of the image. “And Los Muertos, international criminal organization for the win? You follow that big money and you find it’s practically a franchise, man.  Taco Bell with guns. Y’know, I _never_ looked at our own finances, where my tech was coming from, I was just happy to have it,” she snorted and took a drink. “There’s so much that’s not right. They say us Brides, we’re always from the poor and the downtrodden or whatever because God loves us, right? The Reaper chooses us through the lottery? But I think we’re expendable, focus grouped to whoever’s gonna have the most tragic backstory, and everybody loves a fucking underdog.”

Jack took a long drink with her, staring out at the darkened city beyond.  “People will _love_ that,” he said softly, imitating O’Deorain.

“I’ve thought about running. I can do it, I know how to disappear, like a shadow, right? But I’m gonna stay. Thing’s’ll be fucked for my mom if I run, I think. So, gonna see what else I can learn. And maybe, who the hell knows, maybe there _is_ something waiting up there.  I’m a hacker, not a philosopher.”

“I don’t know what the hell I am anymore,” Jack muttered, sitting back. “I don’t know. Everything’s happening too fast.”

“Anways, new Bride. My brother or sister, don’t worry, ok? I’ll do my best, keep my eye on you from the great beyond. If you know anything about me, you know where to find more. What you do with the infodump, whatever journey you take, you’re not alone. Good luck- I love you, even if I don’t know you, yet.”

Olivia Colomar winked and blew her trademark kiss and Jack saluted with his drink before the image flickered out. Echo immediately straightened. “…and that’s your itinerary for the morning. Would you like me to print it out, your Holiness?”

 Jack drained the rest of the bottle. “That would be great.” 


	7. Chapter 7

 Jack blinked back to consciousness, the sour taste of whiskey in his mouth.

His brain was full, a tangled mess of Olivia Colomar’s wink and a smile before she’d stepped out into the arms of the Reaper coupled with an oily darkness swallowing him whole, fey eyes glinting in the shadows, chittering as _he_ as _she_ as _they_ _all_ _of_ _the Brides_ drowned under the weight of dark. _Suffocating_.

 Jack was drowning in the choking dark when something held him, curling softly against his lips and cheeks. ( _Wake up, Frankie, you’re safe now_.)

 He didn’t remember lying down, but there he was, tangled in the bathrobe and sheets, and Jack itched at his arm sockets, feedback tingling unpleasantly at the base of his skull as he sat up. Initial panic gripped his chest. This wasn’t his bed, this wasn’t his house.

 No. Jack Morrison was the Bride, and with that thought the last day came rushing back.

“Echo?” He rasped, rubbing at the ache in his artificial eyes as the sunlight stabbed into his synthetic retinas.

No answer, but there was the sound of movement beyond his room. Footsteps, heavy, scraping against the floor.

There was a reason Jack had lived alone after his time in the endless police actions, why he took his pleasure and money from strangers safely separated from him by a camera and monitors. He’d fought the monster down, gotten himself sorted as much as his VA allowance would get him,  could go to the market without prepping for a war.

And then some assholes in black had gone and beaten his door down. The shock of the last day had worn off but the suffocating dream was fresh in his forebrain, kicking old responses back into gear.

 _Someone had tried to kidnap Olivia seven times._ The resignation in her face as she said that burned in the back of his vision.

His heartbeat ticked up in his ears, and there was a flicker in the corner of his vision, the old vitals HUD the army hadn’t completely shut down. Primed fight responses kicked in just as the wetware intended, and Jack slid, knife-silent into the hall to the little kitchen.

_Olivia’s story whispered over his hammering heart._

His old arms would have given him a weapon HUD, but he gritted his teeth against the fresh feedback as he made a fist and swung…

Right at McCree. The operative turned in a flash, his own gloved hand catching Jack’s with an impact that rattled the cabinets. They blinked at each other, McCree’s warm brown eyes wide, before he immediately settled himself back into his laconic grin. “Guess I shoulda announced myself, apologies, your Holiness,” he said, holding Jack’s hand for a moment too long, before letting it drop.

His dark jacket and tie lay across the back of a nearby chair, and the sleeves of his tailored, white shirt were rolled up, brown hair pulled back in a neat ponytail. But the shoulder holsters and knife at his belt dispelled any momentary illusion that he might have just been a businessman making breakfast.

About thirty questions piled up in Jack’s brain like a car crash and when he opened his mouth, all that came out was “What the _fuck_?”

McCree’s professional smile dropped, and he threw his head back with a roar of a laugh. After a moment, Jack perched on the edge of the table and laughed too, shaking his head as the adrenaline drained out of his veins.

“I am sorry, Echo said you’d had a rough night. Figured I’d be quiet like a dang mouse, let her get in her maintenance time and you some breakfast before the circus starts up again. Reaper love her, but Echo canNOT cook no matter what she tells you her programming is,” McCree wheezed, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. “My bad in not taking into consideration your background,” he added, more soberly. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

Jack felt his face burn under the weight of McCree’s gaze and immediately found something interesting to look at over the other man’s shoulder. “It’s ok, just a little rattled,” he muttered. “Breakfast sounds great, what’s on the agenda for today?” He asked, remembering a moment later that Echo had printed out an entire itinerary that he’d promptly ignored before passing out. 

McCree lifted an eyebrow and shook his head. “Pro tip, pay attention when Echo gives you your schedule,” he turned to grab a mug of coffee for Jack. “Like for instance, you’re meeting the Pope in a few hours.” He held onto the mug until the look of shock on Jack’s face faded. “Don’t worry, first couple days are always like this, even when shit doesn’t go pear shaped out of the box.”

Jack took the coffee gratefully, and tried not to look McCree in the eyes. “Does that happen a lot, Mister McCree?”

“Not if I can help it, your Holiness,” McCree bowed a bit. “And you can call me Jess. Hell, call me whatever you want, there’s been some creative variations over the years,” he laughed.

Jack rapped his fingers against the mug, rubbery surface of the tips tapping softly. “You been doing this long?”

McCree’s face shuttered briefly, then his professional smile returned. “Long enough, I suppose.  Now you wait right there, got you some presents because Moira will straight up drop dead of rage if we take you to see Father Akande looking like you do.”

“I feel like I should be offended by that,” Jack set the mug down.

“Hey, now. Don’t go fishing for compliments,” McCree drawled from the living room, “you’re one fine looking fellow and you know it.” He strode back in, a case in his hands, and eyed Jack critically. “Take off the bathrobe if you don’t mind?”

Jack slid the fabric off his shoulders, searching McCree’s face for any signs of interest beyond the professional, but the agent only quirked his eyebrow as the robe fell to the floor. “So, what’s next?”

McCree grinned and opened the case. “I thought you might… like a hand,” he said presenting the contents. The arms were gleaming blue, polymer and carbon, and McCree presented them like he was on a game show. “Want me to help you put ‘em on? I know a thing or two ‘bout that.”

“I… I would like that _Mister_ McCree.”

McCree’s gloved hands were deft and gentle as they disconnected the maglocks and connectors of Jack’s VA replacement arms from the sockets. “When I hit you, that wasn’t a meat hand. You caught me with.”

“Nah, fully artificial to the elbow, biosynthetic replacement from there to the shoulder. Lost it in the Phoenix riots when I was a tot,” McCree said absently while Jack shivered under his touch. “If nothin’ else, Blackwatch’s got a great health plan.” His hands ghosted across Jack’s shoulders. “How’s that?”

The HUD flickered in his vision as the arms synched, and Jack wiggled his fingers. “I could use some help calibrating the sensory input,” he said hopefully.

But McCree’s face sobered. “I just want to make one thing clear, your Holiness,” he said gently. “I will protect you with my life. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe and happy. But I will not sleep with you. You get lonely in bed, hell, I will personally vet someone for you to enjoy, but I can’t ever, ever sleep with you, sir.”

Jack’s new hands twitched. “Of course not, Jess. Let’s not keep Father Akande waiting.”


	8. Chapter 8

There was an enormous difference between “church” and The Church, Jack thought as McCree drove them through traffic. After the Reaper had come, old systems had been subsumed, syncretized.  There were different flavours, but all of them had one black, tarry centre 

Jack had been to _church_. But the thought of going to _The Church_ filled him with unease.

The new suit fit perfectly, the new arms fit perfectly, and Jack sat imperfectly in the backseat of a limo, fidgeting as McCree sang along with the radio.

He’d seen Akande Ogundimu on TV a thousand times, offering comfort to the victims of the latest police actions and riots, holiday speeches about humanity’s growth through adversity, and simply looking impossibly stylish as he shuttled between appointments.

“Hey, McCree,” Jack fished a small bottle of water out of the luxurious little fridge between the back seats and rubbed his thumb over it, reveling in the sensation of cold against his new fingertips. “Father Akande.  What’s he like, really?”

“I can’t say that I can rightly answer that, Your Holiness,” Jess’s amber eyes flicked into the rearview and Jack quickly looked out the window at the passing city. “He’s got the voice of the Reaper in his ear and I know he’s got a lot of big thoughts about the way the world ought to be working, even when it’s not.”  He hummed softly as the limo glided over the massive bridge that led out to the scar in the ocean where the Reaper had first touched the Earth. Jack squinted up through the sunroof and imagined he could see a wink of light where the Station hung in geosynchronous orbit.

The Talon sat in the centre of it, a gleaming column of black glass rising out of kilometer square segment of water frozen in mid wave. Jack had heard an explanation of it once, that once summoned, the Reaper had redirected the potential motion of nearly a billion cubic litres of seawater, punching a hole through the atmosphere and through the city-sized Omnic combat God-platform above it.

The entire world experienced the lightshow as the being dispersed into the mesosphere and then outwards into the thermosphere. Pieces of bastion drones still occasionally dropped out of the upper atmosphere – Jack still vividly remembered when he was eight, one had turned one of old Gram’s cows into a beefy, pink mist- but most never made it, absorbed into the rolling black clouds that coursed along the edges of the magnetic field.

Now, though, the midday sun disappeared into the low-gloss darkness of the building, the platforms around it swarming with tourists and pilgrims and paparazzi. A few along the edges of the promenade peered intently at the limo, and McCree chuckled from the front seat. “Paps got your scent, Your Holiness. Moira’s right though, you’re photogenic as hell. They’re gonna shit themselves when they see you and the Father together.”

“Should I wave or something?” Jack asked, not really listening for an answer. Every single person in this crowd had suddenly ceased to be a potential worshipper and he found himself searching for signs he’d have to fight. The last three Brides had been a student, a hacker and a party boy. Jack Morrison was none of those things, and a new combat HUD began to tick up in the corner of his vision. The arms had synched with his military wetware and began calibrating lethal force.

“Nah, don’t wave, and take a deep breath. Your Holiness…” McCree slowed the limo at the gates and flashed his ID. “Mister Mor.. _Jack_. Listen to me, I’m not gonna let anything happen to you. I meant that.”

“I know,” Jack did take a deep breath, and tried to ramp down the adrenaline thudding in his veins as McCree stopped in front of the Talon’s massive steps. “I know.”

“Remember, back straight, smile like you got god in your guts, and we’ll be inside in a sec. Then the real stuff starts,” McCree grinned as he opened the door.

Jack slid out of the limo, eyes immediately activating extra cones to compensate for the bright sun. There was a roar in the crowd and Jack felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

A breeze skittered across the surface of the sea, ruffling his golden hair in the sunlight and tugging at the hem of his blue coat. He squared his shoulders and looked out at the crowd with a little smile.

“Well, goddamn,” he heard Jess breath softly next to him. “Look at you.”

At the front of the crowd Jack saw that soldier again, with his handsome dark face and greying curls. He didn’t look amused, he looked concerned, and Jack followed the turn of his face to the left, and saw a wink of light.

The adrenaline dampeners immediately cut out and Jack grabbed McCree by the arm, dragging him down as the first bullet pinged off the limo just where his head would have been a half-heartbeat before. Jack was on his feet in the next half-beat, bounding the barricade to find the shooter. The crowd was in absolute chaos, and Jack caught only a glimpse of what he thought was deep blue hair before the turmoil of spectators and guards overwhelmed him.

There were too many people, too close and just as Jack’s combat rush threatened to turn into panic, it was McCree’s turn to haul him out, yelling about how he’d have the Bride back out real soon for the public as he dragged Jack towards the doors.

“I need all of you to figure out how someone got a goddamn gun into the Talon, now!” Jess roared as he pushed Jack inside. “No one in or out till you find that shooter, and get Moira and her team on crowd pacification like yesterday!” His cybernetic hand tightened on Jack’s arm. “And you! You do not go and engage fucking enemies like you’re still a goddamn grunt, you’re the goddamn Bride of the GODDAMN REAPER and you let ME take that goddamn bullet you hear me, you dumb motherfucker?!”

The lobby fell absolutely silent, and panting, Jess let Jack go, both of them blinking .

“I think Agent McCree needs a few moments to collect himself,” a deep, rich voice came, and both Jack and Jess snapped around to see Father Akande, flanked by his staff, coming down the steps. His white suit was crisp and perfect against the gleaming dark of his skin, and his own implants were elegant, glittering in the lobby’s more subdued lighting. “Your Holiness,” he said smoothly, inclining his head. “Welcome to the Talon.”


End file.
